The minor Cronenberg

Abstract

Cronenberg’s minor films – those that defy, exceed, or otherwise work outside the director’s famous themes and spectacles – emphasize a signature detachment or dispassion, one that is also operant in his most popular films. This detachment invites one to read his films as what Deleuze and Guattari would call minor cinema, a sociopolitical hermeneutic alternative to auteurism. Deleuze and Guattari explain that ‘a minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language’, including that which an English Canadian filmmaker constructs in the shadow of the Hollywood tradition. Minor cinema is always political, even and especially when it addresses the individual and the personal, and it is collective, in that its films ‘express another possible community and forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility’. Focusing on the staid cinematography and impassive protagonists of two of Cronenberg’s less studied works – Fast Company (1979) and Cosmopolis (2012) – I argue that the revolutionary potential of minor cinema unites his otherwise heterogeneous oeuvre.